Five years and three dozen reports later, here's the biggest thing I have learned when it comes to comparing how kids are doing in Milwaukee Public Schools and in the publicly funded voucher program for private schools:

We've got some schools that are getting very good results. But we've got a lot of problems, and that's true across the board. You'll find schools where weak outcomes are the dominant reality in MPS, in the voucher program and among the independent charter schools. Three major streams of schools in Milwaukee and not much reason to cheer for any of them, in and of themselves.

What's there to cheer for? Specific high performing schools - voucher, charter and MPS. Specific school leaders, teachers, supporters and kids. Specific people who are pushing to improve the status quo. Specific people who are willing to work together, including across ideological lines, to build up what works and tear down what doesn't.

What's there to cheer for? People who are serious participants in the pursuit of quality and results, regardless of the overarching governing and financial structure of their schools.

Five years and three dozen reports later, we know a lot about comparing the streams of Milwaukee education - and, it seems to me, it's time to move past that. It's time to focus on success school by school and what can be done to increase it effectively.

I invite you to turn to pages 22 and 23 of Report #32 from the School Choice Demonstration Project, the multimillion dollar effort based out of the University of Arkansas that has gone far to shed light on what was previously far too much of a mystery: Just what is being accomplished in Milwaukee's nationally significant experiment, now 22 years old, that allows thousands of low-income children to use public money to attend private, almost all religious schools.

On those two pages, researchers Anna M. Jacob and Patrick J. Wolf chart the percentage of proficient voucher students in fourth and eighth grades in dozens of private schools, based on scores on Wisconsin's standardized tests. And they compare the school totals to the average score for low-income students in MPS schools (which is, frankly, not setting the bar real high). In most instances, a third to half of the voucher schools did better than the overall MPS rate. And half to two-thirds did worse.

Turn to pages 15 through 19 of the same report for a different approach, bringing the same conclusion: The overall array of success of MPS and voucher schools is pretty similar.

You can generalize - for example, this year's results, for the first time, showed that growth in reading was better (to a statistically significant level) among voucher students than among students in a matched sample of MPS students. And voucher students overall had somewhat better outcomes when it came to graduating high school and going on to college.

But I'm not real sure where to go with the generalizations. The reports don't try to give a cause for those results. Any or all of a list of possible explanations might be parts of the answer.

But there is hope for going somewhere with the variation in individual school results. That has a lot more potential for bringing results than more rounds of ideological battles. I don't think any of the streams of schools we've got are going to go away. So let's work on making them better, school by school.

That brings front and center a big question: Will Wisconsin make something of a chance to create a better, more effective system of school-by-school accountability or will we fritter that chance away, largely because of partisan differences?

Hope for consensus

In recent months, it seemed like agreement was emerging. A task force including people from across the education spectrum was making progress in coming up with a plan that would hold all schools to higher standards and make clearer to parents and others what to make of each school's performance.

Gov. Scott Walker and other supporters of the voucher movement began talking about the need for including all "publicly-funded students" in the system. That was actually a major change, opening the door for voucher schools to be held accountable on a basis at least similar to public schools.

In recent weeks, things got rocky. When a Republican-backed bill began moving in the Legislature without any school accountability provisions, Democrats cried foul, saying it looked like the voucher schools were getting off the hook. On the other hand, the state Department of Public Instruction submitted a proposal for a waiver from current federal rules that envisioned sanctions on the lowest performing schools in the state, including some voucher schools. Voucher advocates sharply criticized the proposal.

There are indications that, behind the scenes, people are still working to find common ground. But success will require breaking barriers. People whose real agenda is to quash voucher and charter schools are not likely to be constructive participants in a process to help improve the bad performers among those schools. And voucher defenders who want to stick to a just-let-us-take-care-of-ourselves approach that has failed to improve or close some really bad schools over the years risk showing themselves to be allies of bad education.

In other words, hey, folks, can't we break out of our unhelpful silos, deal with the reality we have and work together to make it better?

We now know a lot about student performance in voucher schools and how it compares to student performance in MPS. This is interesting and good. But a big thing it shows is that the answer to our problems isn't just promoting vouchers or promoting public schools. The answer is building up good schools and dealing effectively with weak ones. That needs to be done across the board.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.